The Fiber Game

This article talks about two past ideals regarding fiber art.  The first had to do with the position of the “designer-craftsman” and how craft was thought of as a laboratory for industrial production.  The second ideal involved the development of realizing fiber art could be used to create three dimensional shapes.  At first weaver created three-dimensionality by distorting the pattern of the warp and weft while the piece was still on the loom.  Due to a considerable amount of exhibitions and publications in a three-year span from 1969 to 1972 American weavers working in the sculptural mode grew and was about to be recognized in the public.

Ed Rossbach is a fiber artist and looked at the two ways fiber art seemed to be growing and decided to look at it from a different angle.  He published an article called “The Fiber Game” commenting on how fiber art should remain in the hands of the weaver.  He did this by talking about string games many people played as children like cat’s cradle.  I thought it was interesting how Rossbach focused his work on found materials he did so in a way that it did not make a political statement or try to compete with the image-making power of mass media.  Leo Steinberg called it the “flatbed aesthetic” meaning that the artwork becomes a ground for experience around it.  I was interesting how he managed to learn all of these processes in order to be able to deal with all of the materials he would work with.  At the end of this section he compares fiber to things like architecture saying that an architect builds a building then calls in a fiber artist, never the other way around.  He likes that this happens and says it puts fiber in relation to him.  I thought this last statement was interesting because it’s true, it would be a bit ridiculous to build a building around a textile but it was an interesting concept to consider while reading this section.